Nonfiction Matters
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Posted by Marc Aronson on November 20, 2009
More Facts or More Thoughts?Last night I met with two experts on education and education reform. They have both been working with the government, foundations, and private companies for decades -- seeing one phase of reform replaced by another. They made clear to me something Nina had raised in her comment the other day about teachers -- the focus on facts. The shift to standards loads more and more and more and more and more stuff onto what a teacher is theoretically supposed to cover and the student is supposed to know. Of course it is really all a shell game -- what the student needs to know is that tiny subset of all of that stuff that will be on the test. But since neither student nor teacher knows what that subset will be, coverage is all. Standards have come to mean loads of facts -- not how to find them, think about them, organize them, make sense of them, or exp...Read More
Posted by Marc Aronson on November 19, 2009
The Times coverage of last night's NBA awards fits our interests perfectly -- note the speech from the adult NF winner and the focus on the young readers' winner -- again for the first time a NF author -- congratulations to Philip Hoose and to non fiction writers, editors, copy editors and proof readers everywheretinyurl.com/ygbcqse
Posted by Marc Aronson on November 18, 2009
"Question the Answers"
Posted by Marc Aronson on November 17, 2009
My Doctoral Adviser Once Said of Historians, "We Are the Elders; We Pass On the Knowledge of the Past"If you know something, it is your responsibility to share it with those who lack that knowledge. You have been presented with a gift, but the terms of the bequest are clear -- you must share it, pass it on, to all those who need it. That friends is what it means to be a nonfiction author for younger readers -- we have been gifted with the chance to learn, to discover, to know, and thus we have the responsibility to share, to inform, to educate. This preamble applies to Afghanistan, but, I realized yesterday, also to Fort Hood. Here's why: a columnist in Forbes raised the question of whether the killings should be known as Going Muslim -- ala Going Postal tinyurl.com/yfk3rms &nbs...Read More
Posted by Marc Aronson on November 16, 2009
More Fallout from the CCBC DiscussionSorry to be late posting today, over the weekend I got caught up in the CCBC thread on reviewing where both my own views, and, more generally the issue of NF reviewing, came up in many posts. A few key themes emerged from the discussion that are worth our continuing to consider here. On the one hand the topic of reviewing quickly brought out the many embattled subcommunities within the worlds of books for young readers. The librarians who write and read the solid majority of journal reviews made clear that they face three daunting pressures: little time to consider a book, little space to comment, and the weight of knowing that they are advising cash strapped peers on collection development. In effect their review is saying: do you need this book if you already have that one. Will you be disappointed with it? Will it stir up trou...Read More
Posted by Marc Aronson on November 13, 2009
AfghanistanAs we wait to see what Obama decides on troops, I realized that I had been avoiding my (and perhaps our) responsibility. I am not sure what the right strategy is there -- this blog is not a advertisement for one political camp or another. But it suddenly hit me that our nation is making a decision that may well effect the lives -- literally the life or death, but also the quality of life -- of the teenagers we claim we are helping to educate and inform with our nonfiction books. And yet what leadership are we showing? The issues are complex -- the very best experts have conflicting views, and even if we take the most rational choice based on the most deeply considered advice, there is no guarantee of what outcome that will produce. The reality is no one is sure what would happen if we sent in 30-40,000 more troops, or if we withdrew and just left traini...Read More
Posted by Marc Aronson on November 12, 2009
Inspired By the Discussion Over at CCBC, I've Come to a Realization about NF Reviews The discussion over at the CCBC listserv was supposed to be about professional reviews -- which ones do people read, which are useful, how, why, how do reviewers review, etc. Before that thread ever began the discussion lurched to one side as Debbie Reese described her experience as a reviewer and her conviction that she needed to bring her Native American perspective to reviews -- which soon set sail into the wars over authenticity and who gets to speak for whom. All both fervent and familiar. But as I read the posts something hit me -- a fundamental difference between what an author thinks a review is and what many/most reviewers aim to accomplish. An author who has labored on a book for a year, say, of course wants a star, a pat on the head, a boost in ...Read More
Posted by Marc Aronson on November 10, 2009
T.S. Eliot Frames This DiscussionWhere is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? (from The Rock, quoted in Michael Kaplan and Ellen Kaplan, Chances Are...Adventures in Probability tinyurl.com/yg5j6s9) My last post related to exactly what Eliot laments -- as we live in an information age what knowledge, what wisdom, what sense of deep and profound life are we in danger of losing? Is it loss or change? If change from what to what? By pure coincidence I happen to be reading a group of books that frame the heritage of Greece and Rome in the West. I mentioned Adrianne Mayor's The Poison King -- which is set just as Rome slides from Republic ...Read More
Posted by Marc Aronson on November 8, 2009
= TextI'm reading a fascinating book professor Mary Carruthers called The Book of Memory tinyurl.com/yk8d2au This is a study of what memory meant in the middle ages, and the techniques people used to store, retrieve, and combine information they held in their brains. The most famous example of this is the "memory palace of Matteo Ricci" (described in a book of that name by Jonathan Spence, www.riccistreet.net/riccigreen/patron/palace.htm). In effect, scholars trained their minds to function as databases, creating visual icons in their minds that allowed them to store and shuffle vast amounts of information. The parallel to modern computing is self evident. But even as I am learning and comparing eras, Carruthers keeps giving me extra...Read More
Posted by Marc Aronson on November 5, 2009
Some Books On My ShelfDid you all catch the article in the Times about new views of the Battle of Agincourt? tinyurl.com/ykg235l If you, or your school, teaches Henry V part one this is a great article to circ, because the whole "Band of Brothers" image of the vastly outnumbered plucky English against the arrogant, aristocratic, French has come under question. I'm no Early Modern or military history expert, and the article makes clear that there are competing views, some still see the battle as Shakespeare did. But what is wonderful about this piece is it shows how our views of the past are changing. In this case, because of detailed archival work -- instead of building up a sense of the past only, or mainly, from written accounts (thus generally by men attached in some way to power -- the church, the nobilit...Read More
Posted by Marc Aronson on November 3, 2009
The HF Seminar Clarified Something For Me -- And I Hope For You -- About K-12 Nonfiction
Posted by Marc Aronson on November 2, 2009
BothI selected the passages from March because I see in them examples of what I treasure as well as what I dislike in HF. Oddly enough the same book, even the same paragraph epitomized both ends of the HF spectrum -- to my eyes. Like Mary, I found that whole first excerpt up through the word "shards" to be a marvel. It exemplified what Greenblatt said of Mantell. Brooks combined visual description with such a deep sense of time that the supposed moment of writing was not only reflected in word choices ("slough," "obelisk") but in the very character of the world the narrator was seeing and describing. Perhaps Brooks had some period photo or engraving to use as reference, but she was not merely describing it with a few period terms like a reenacter wearing a costume, she was inhabiting that world, seeing it with the worn, dashed-id...Read More
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